Hildegarde's Holiday Part 11

"No, Miss Encyclopaedia, I do not!" replied Hildegarde, with some asperity. "You know I _never_ know anything of that kind; tell me about it!"

"Well, it is very curious," said Rose, taking the great bunch of mourning-bride that her friend handed her, and separating the flowers daintily. "The flower-heads of this teasel, when they are dried, are covered with sharp curved hooks, and are used to raise the nap on woollen cloth. No machine or instrument that can be invented does it half so well as this dead and withered blossom. Isn't that interesting?"

"Very!" said Hildegarde. "Oh, dear! oh, dear!"

"What _is_ the matter?" cried Rose, in alarm. "Has something stung you?

Let me--"

"Oh, no!" said Hildegarde, quickly. "I was only thinking of the appalling number of things there are to know. They overwhelm me! They bury me! A mountain weighs me down, and on its top grows a--a teasel.

Why, I never heard of the thing! I am not sure that I am clear what a fuller is, except that his earth is advertised in the Pears'

soap-boxes."

They both laughed at this, and then Hildegarde bent with renewed energy over a bed of feathered pinks of all shades of crimson and rose-color.

"A mountain!" said Rose, slowly and thoughtfully, as she laid the blossoms together and tied them up in small posies. "Yes, Hilda, so it is! but a mountain to climb, not to be buried under. To think that we can go on climbing, learning, all our lives, and always with higher and higher peaks above us, soaring up and up,--oh, it is glorious! What might be the matter with you to-day, my lamb?" she added; for Hildegarde groaned, and plunged her face into a great white lily, withdrawing it to show a nose powdered with virgin gold. "Does your head ache?"

"I think the sturgeon is at the bottom of it," was the reply. "I have not yet recovered fully from the humiliation of having been so frightened by a sturgeon, when I had been brought up, so to speak, on the 'Culprit Fay.' I have eaten caviare too," she added gloomily,--"odious stuff!"

"But, my _dear_ Hilda!" cried Rose, in amused perplexity, "this is too absurd. Why shouldn't one be frightened at a monstrous creature leaping out of the water just before one's nose, and how should you know he was a sturgeon? You couldn't expect him to say 'I am a sturgeon!' or to carry a placard hung round his neck, with 'Fresh Caviare!' on it."

Hildegarde laughed. "You remind me," added Rose, "that my own ignorance list is getting pretty long. Get me some sweet-peas, that's a dear; and I can ask you the things while you are picking them." Hildegarde moved to the long rows of sweet-peas, which grew near the laburnum bower; and Rose drew a little brown note-book from her pocket, and laid it open on the table beside her. "What is 'Marlowe's mighty line'?" she demanded bravely. "I keep coming across the quotation in different things, and I don't know who Marlowe was. Yet you see I am cheerful."

"Kit Marlowe!" said Hildegarde. "Poor Kit! he was a great dramatist; the next greatest after Shakspeare, I think,--at least, well, leaving out the Greeks, you know. He was a year younger than Shakspeare, and died when he was only twenty-eight, killed in a tavern brawl."

"Oh, how dreadful!" cried gentle Rose. "Then he had only begun to write."

"Oh, no!" said Hildegarde. "He had written a great deal,--'Faustus' and 'Edward II.,' and 'Tamburlaine,' and--oh! I don't know all. But one thing of his _you_ know, 'The Pa.s.sionate Shepherd,'--'Come live with me and be my love;' you remember?"

"Oh!" cried Rose. "Did he write that? I love him, then."

"And so many, many lovely things!" continued Hildegarde, warming to her subject, and snipping sweet-peas vigorously. "Mamma has read me a good deal here and there,--all of 'Edward II.,' and bits from 'Faustus.'

There is one place, where he sees Helen--oh, I must remember it!--

"'Was this the face that launched a thousand s.h.i.+ps, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?'

Isn't that full of pictures? I see them! I see the s.h.i.+ps, and the white, royal city, and the beautiful, beautiful face looking down from a tower window."

Both girls were silent a moment; then Rose asked timidly, "And who spoke of the 'mighty line,' dear? It must have been another great poet. Only three words, and such a roll and ring and brightness in them."

"Oh! Ben Jonson!" said Hildegarde. "He was another great dramatist, you know; a little younger, but of the same time with Shakspeare and Marlowe. He lived to be quite old, and he wrote a very famous poem on Shakspeare, 'all full of quotations,' as somebody said about 'Hamlet.'

It is in that that he says 'Marlowe's mighty line,' and 'Sweet Swan of Avon,' and 'Soul of the Age,' and all sorts of pleasant things. So nice of him!"

"And--and was he an ancestor of Dr. Samuel's?" asked Rose, humbly.

"Why, darling, you are really quite ignorant!" cried Hildegarde, laughing. "How delightful to find things that you don't know! No, he had no _h_ in his name,--at least, it had been left out; but he came originally from the Johnstones of Annandale. Think of it! he may have been a cousin of Jock Johnstone the Tinkler, without knowing it. Well, his father died when he was little, and his mother married a brick-layer; and Ben used to carry hods of mortar up ladders,--oh me!

what a strange world it is! By-and-by he was made Laureate,--the first Laureate,--and he was very great and glorious, and wrote masques and plays and poems, and quarrelled with Inigo Jones--no! I can't stop to tell you who he was," seeing the question in Rose's eyes,--"and grew very fat. But when he was old they neglected him, poor dear! and when he died he was buried standing up straight, in Westminster Abbey; and his friend Jack Young paid a workman eighteenpence to carve on a stone 'O Rare Ben Jonson!' and there it is to this day."

She paused for breath; but Rose said nothing, seeing that more was coming. "But the best of all," continued Hildegarde, "was his visit to Drummond of Hawthornden. Oh, Rose, that was so delightful!"

"Tell me about it!" said Rose, softly. "Not that I know who _he_ was; but his name is a poem in itself."

"Isn't it?" cried Hildegarde. "He was a poet too, a Scottish poet, living in a wonderful old house--"

"Not 'caverned Hawthornden,' in 'Lovely Rosabelle'?" cried Rose, her eyes lighting up with new interest.

"Yes!" replied Hildegarde, "just that. Do you know why it is 'caverned'?

That must be another story. Remind me to tell you when we are doing our hair to-night. But now you must hear about Ben. Well, he went on a walking tour to Scotland, and one of his first visits was to William Drummond, with whom he had corresponded a good deal. Drummond was sitting under his great sycamore-tree, waiting for him, and at last he saw a great ponderous figure coming down the avenue, flouris.h.i.+ng a huge walking-stick. Of course he knew who it was; so he went forward to meet him, and called out, 'Welcome, welcome, royal Ben!' 'Thank ye, thank ye, Hawthornden!' answered Jonson; and then they both laughed and were friends at once."

"Hildegarde, where do you find all these wonderful things?" cried Rose, in amazement. "That is delightful, enchanting. And for you to call yourself ignorant! Oh!"

"There is a life of Drummond at home," said Hildegarde, simply. "Of course one reads lovely things,--there is no merit in that; and the teasel still flaunts. But I _do_ feel better. That is just my baseness, to be glad when you don't know things, you dearest! But do just look at these sweet-peas! I have picked all these,--pecks! bushels!--and there are as many as ever. Don't you think we have enough flowers, Rosy?"

"I do indeed!" answered Rose. "Enough for a hundred children at least.

Besides, it must be time for them to go. The lovely things! Think of all the pleasure they will give! A sick child, and a bunch of flowers like these!" She took up a posy of velvet pansies and sweet-peas, set round with mignonette, and put it lovingly to her lips. "I remember--" She paused, and sighed, and then smiled.

"Yes, dear!" said Hildegarde, interrogatively. "The house where you were born?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'DON'T YOU THINK WE HAVE ENOUGH FLOWERS, ROSY?'"]

"One day I was in dreadful pain," said Rose,--"pain that seemed as if it would never end,--and a little child from a neighbor's house brought a bunch of Ragged Robin, and laid it on my pillow, and said, 'Poor Pinky! make she better!' I think I have never loved any other flower quite so much as Ragged Robin, since then. It is the only one I miss here. Do you want to hear the little rhyme I made about it, when I was old enough?"

Hildegarde answered by sitting down on the arm of the rustic seat, and throwing her arm round her friend's shoulder in her favorite fas.h.i.+on.

"Such a pleasant Rosebud!" she murmured. "Tell now!"

And Rose told about--

RAGGED ROBIN.

O Robin, ragged Robin, That stands beside the door, The sweetheart of the country child, The flower of the poor,

I love to see your cheery face, Your straggling bravery; Than many a stately garden bloom You're dearer far to me.

For you it needs no sheltered nook, No well-kept flower-bed; By cottage porch, by roadside ditch, You raise your honest head.

The small hedge-sparrow knows you well, The blackbird is your friend; With cl.u.s.tering bees and b.u.t.terflies Your pink-fringed blossoms bend.

O Robin, ragged Robin, The dearest flower that grows, Why don't you patch your tattered cloak?

Why don't you mend your hose?

Would you not like to prank it there Within the border bright, Among the roses and the pinks, A courtly dame's delight?

"Ah no!" says jolly Robin, "'T would never do for me; The friend of bird and b.u.t.terfly, Like them I must be free.

"The garden is for stately folk, The lily and the rose; They'd scorn my coat of ragged pink, Would flout my broken hose.

"Then let me bloom in wayside ditch, And by the cottage door, The sweetheart of the country child, The flower of the poor."